Opinion
Success Of Canada’s Women Does Not Mean Men Failed
As usual, the Olympics delivered transcendent national moments for Canada.
It happens every Games. In 2010 the host city of Vancouver itself was the moment that provided a binding agent. In 1996 it was Donovan Bailey crushing the Americans on the track. In 1976 it was a lone high-jump silver medal by Greg Joy. This time in Tokyo it was Christine Sinclair & Co. (the women’s soccer team), a sprinter from Markham and a race walker from B.C. who remind Canadians of who they are, why they are, and how much reinforcement of a single nationality matters.
Except it rarely happens. Canada needs to win. Not all the time. Just enough to make the plucky challenger role thing work. Beating the U.S. in women’s soccer might be the ultimate underdog role that tells the 36 million chez nous that for all its horrific weather and language stress the Great White North is a good place to live.
Unfortunately the five percent who think they run modern Canada don’t count blessings they way they used to. A prime minister in a hurry to call an election during a pandemic— that he’s abetted— sees the roll of honour quite differently.
It’s now a diversity dance. In place of promoting unity while wearing the maple leaf the PM promotes separating Canadians by their Woke characteristics. Pitting segments of society to achieve peak tribal identity is his MO. In this Orwellian construct he’s fully backed by host broadcaster CBC, the rest of the bought media and labour leaders like Jerry Dias.
The laboured attempts to paint the Olympics as a political coming-out party was a hallmark of the CBC News Olympic features about Canada’s winners. When the Corp allowed its sports announcers like Steve Armitage, Mark Lee or Doug Dirks to call it straight you might be persuaded that it was your grandfather’s Olympics still.
Don’t be fooled. The PM who worships his brand of diversity (but practices otherwise) sees the Olympics as a blue-check exercise in drawing new lines between people who struggle at the best of times to find some unifying concept. (Just ask the CFL which adopted his “diversity” mantra but then was stiffed at its time of crisis by a government with loftier public goals to achieve alongside WE. )
According to Justin Trudeau Reality (taught by Gerry Butts) the final medal standings at the Tokyo Games should read something like this:
CDN. women athletes/ teams 19
Biopoc single athletes. 5
Muslim medal winners 1
LGBTQ (all nations) 182
Trans CDN athletes 1
Privileged white walkers 1
Gold medals for our Chinese friends 38
The loudest progressive braying will likely be about the preponderance of medals won by Canada’s (traditional) women athletes. Of the gold, silver and bronzes handed out to athletes (for them to put on themselves) women and teams of women garnered 19 medals.
It was a great show. From the first medal (Caileigh Filmer, Hillary Janssens for rowing) to the final gold (Kelsey Mitchell in cycling sprint) women did dominate the standings for Canadians. And beat the smug Americans in soccer. This led the usual suspects to gloat about how men couldn’t keep up/ were lacking moral fibre etc. Where would the nation be without the fruits of progressive feminism?
A few caveats here. In about half the nations in the world women are not allowed to compete at all or are severely hampered by religious doctrines or cannot get funding for the rigorous training needed to make an Olympic final. In short the talent pool that Canadian women swim in is clearly smaller by a large factor than that in which the male athletes compete.
So when you’re watching an Olympic final in rowing or cycling or wrestling the odds that a Canadian woman gets on the podium increase exponentially over what can be expected for a man. A good example is Kelsey Mitchell gold in pursuit. From RBC’s camps identifying her athletic talent to winning the gold was a stunning two years. It’s remarkable, but it’s also virtually impossible in a men’s competition.
It might also help the chances of Canadian men if so many elite athletes didn’t choose hockey as a sport. By the time many realize they won’t make the NHL it’s almost too late to get into a sport as late as Mithchell did.
Another factor aiding Canadian women continues to be the Title IX regulations governing American collegiate sport. U.S. schools have to offer an equal number of sports scholarships to women as to men. Often they cannot find enough elite athletes in some sports to fill out their quotas. (See the Felicity Huffman/ Lori Loughlin scandal )
And so Canadian women have flooded into the NCAA to receive elite training and competition. From swimming (Maggie MacNeil, Michigan) to basketball (Kia Nurse, Connecticut) to soccer (Christine Sinclair) many of Canada’s Olympians are honed outside the country thanks to evening the scholarships. Which solves the age-old dilemma of how to get Canadian sponsors to pony up for future Olympians.
The great question now as Trudeau tries to lock-in his concept of diversity is will the Canadian public finally accept the sporting version of his propaganda? Outside the plum events such as Olympics and world championships, the public has been reluctant to give up its traditional NHL and other team sports to root for women?
And how will it accept the new reality of trans athletes and gender fluidity? People tuning in for a sports event don’t react well when they find they’ve signed up for a BLM, CRT or Liberal Party lecture.
For now, enjoy. And don’t let any politician steal the glory of Canada’s Olympians.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Economy
Federal government’s GHG reduction plan will impose massive costs on Canadians
From the Fraser Institute
Many Canadians are unhappy about the carbon tax. Proponents argue it’s the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which is true, but the problem for the government is that even as the tax hits the upper limit of what people are willing to pay, emissions haven’t fallen nearly enough to meet the federal target of at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Indeed, since the temporary 2020 COVID-era drop, national GHG emissions have been rising, in part due to rapid population growth.
The carbon tax, however, is only part of the federal GHG plan. In a new study published by the Fraser Institute, I present a detailed discussion of the Trudeau government’s proposed Emission Reduction Plan (ERP), including its economic impacts and the likely GHG reduction effects. The bottom line is that the package as a whole is so harmful to the economy it’s unlikely to be implemented, and it still wouldn’t reach the GHG goal even if it were.
Simply put, the government has failed to provide a detailed economic assessment of its ERP, offering instead only a superficial and flawed rationale that overstates the benefits and waives away the costs. My study presents a comprehensive analysis of the proposed policy package and uses a peer-reviewed macroeconomic model to estimate its economic and environmental effects.
The Emissions Reduction Plan can be broken down into three components: the carbon tax, the Clean Fuels Regulation (CFR) and the regulatory measures. The latter category includes a long list including the electric vehicle mandate, carbon capture system tax credits, restrictions on fertilizer use in agriculture, methane reduction targets and an overall emissions cap in the oil and gas industry, new emission limits for the electricity sector, new building and motor vehicle energy efficiency mandates and many other such instruments. The regulatory measures tend to have high upfront costs and limited short-term effects so they carry relatively high marginal costs of emission reductions.
The cheapest part of the package is the carbon tax. I estimate it will get 2030 emissions down by about 18 per cent compared to where they otherwise would be, returning them approximately to 2020 levels. The CFR brings them down a further 6 per cent relative to their base case levels and the regulatory measures bring them down another 2.5 per cent, for a cumulative reduction of 26.5 per cent below the base case 2030 level, which is just under 60 per cent of the way to the government’s target.
However, the costs of the various components are not the same.
The carbon tax reduces emissions at an initial average cost of about $290 per tonne, falling to just under $230 per tonne by 2030. This is on par with the federal government’s estimate of the social costs of GHG emissions, which rise from about $250 to $290 per tonne over the present decade. While I argue that these social cost estimates are exaggerated, even if we take them at face value, they imply that while the carbon tax policy passes a cost-benefit test the rest of the ERP does not because the per-tonne abatement costs are much higher. The CFR roughly doubles the cost per tonne of GHG reductions; adding in the regulatory measures approximately triples them.
The economic impacts are easiest to understand by translating these costs into per-worker terms. I estimate that the annual cost per worker of the carbon-pricing system net of rebates, accounting for indirect effects such as higher consumer costs and lower real wages, works out to $1,302 as of 2030. Adding in the government’s Clean Fuels Regulations more than doubles that to $3,550 and adding in the other regulatory measures increases it further to $6,700.
The policy package also reduces total employment. The carbon tax results in an estimated 57,000 fewer jobs as of 2030, the Clean Fuels Regulation increases job losses to 94,000 and the regulatory measures increases losses to 164,000 jobs. Claims by the federal government that the ERP presents new opportunities for jobs and employment in Canada are unsupported by proper analysis.
The regional impacts vary. While the energy-producing provinces (especially Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick) fare poorly, Ontario ends up bearing the largest relative costs. Ontario is a large energy user, and the CFR and other regulatory measures have strongly negative impacts on Ontario’s manufacturing base and consumer wellbeing.
Canada’s stagnant income and output levels are matters of serious policy concern. The Trudeau government has signalled it wants to fix this, but its climate plan will make the situation worse. Unfortunately, rather than seeking a proper mandate for the ERP by giving the public an honest account of the costs, the government has instead offered vague and unsupported claims that the decarbonization agenda will benefit the economy. This is untrue. And as the real costs become more and more apparent, I think it unlikely Canadians will tolerate the plan’s continued implementation.
Author:
Alberta
Alberta awash in corporate welfare
From the Fraser Institute
By Matthew Lau
To understand Ottawa’s negative impact on Alberta’s economy and living standards, juxtapose two recent pieces of data.
First, in July the Trudeau government made three separate “economic development” spending announcements in Alberta, totalling more than $80 million and affecting 37 different projects related to the “green economy,” clean technology and agriculture. And second, as noted in a new essay by Fraser Institute senior fellow Kenneth Green, inflation-adjusted business investment (excluding residential structures) in Canada’s extraction sector (mining, quarrying, oil and gas) fell 51.2 per cent from 2014 to 2022.
The productivity gains that raise living standards and improve economic conditions rely on business investment. But business investment in Canada has declined over the past decade and total economic growth per person (inflation-adjusted) from Q3-2015 through to Q1-2024 has been less than 1 per cent versus robust growth of nearly 16 per cent in the United States over the same period.
For Canada’s extraction sector, as Green documents, federal policies—new fuel regulations, extended review processes on major infrastructure projects, an effective ban on oil shipments on British Columbia’s northern coast, a hard greenhouse gas emissions cap targeting oil and gas, and other regulatory initiatives—are largely to blame for the massive decline in investment.
Meanwhile, as Ottawa impedes private investment, its latest bundle of economic development announcements underscores its strategy to have government take the lead in allocating economic resources, whether for infrastructure and public institutions or for corporate welfare to private companies.
Consider these federally-subsidized projects.
A gas cloud imaging company received $4.1 million from taxpayers to expand marketing, operations and product development. The Battery Metals Association of Canada received $850,000 to “support growth of the battery metals sector in Western Canada by enhancing collaboration and education stakeholders.” A food manufacturer in Lethbridge received $5.2 million to increase production of plant-based protein products. Ermineskin Cree Nation received nearly $400,000 for a feasibility study for a new solar farm. The Town of Coronation received almost $900,000 to renovate and retrofit two buildings into a business incubator. The Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada received $400,000 for marketing and other support to help boost clean technology product exports. And so on.
When the Trudeau government announced all this corporate welfare and spending, it naturally claimed it create economic growth and good jobs. But corporate welfare doesn’t create growth and good jobs, it only directs resources (including labour) to subsidized sectors and businesses and away from sectors and businesses that must be more heavily taxed to support the subsidies. The effect of government initiatives that reduce private investment and replace it with government spending is a net economic loss.
As 20th-century business and economics journalist Henry Hazlitt put it, the case for government directing investment (instead of the private sector) relies on politicians and bureaucrats—who did not earn the money and to whom the money does not belong—investing that money wisely and with almost perfect foresight. Of course, that’s preposterous.
Alas, this replacement of private-sector investment with public spending is happening not only in Alberta but across Canada today due to the Trudeau government’s fiscal policies. Lower productivity and lower living standards, the data show, are the unhappy results.
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